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David Remnick sits down with Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the creators of a show he loves, “Industry,” which is currently airing its fourth season. The show is centered on the financial and personal dramas of junior employees at a fictional London investment bank. Down and Kay are old friends who both did unsuccessful stints in banking. “Before we could formulate our own identities, we allowed the institution to make them for us,” Down tells Remnick. But, having left finance for television, he says, “I still feel like I want to make money. . . . I’m never content with my career. The reason our show feels like it’s constantly changing and vibrating with electricity is because me and Konrad are, in terms of our careers. And, you know, we want to be successful. We were finance bros in the first instance.”

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As Donald Trump and his Administration threaten to attack Iran, their motivations remain unclear. Does the President want to force Iran to make a nuclear deal, to replace the one that he scrapped in his first term, or is he really seeking regime change? To understand how this all might play out, David Remnick speaks with Karim Sadjadpour, a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who writes about the Middle East for Foreign Affairs and other publications. Citing the disastrous precedents in Afghanistan and Iraq, Sadjadpour notes, “The last two decades has proven that we don’t have the ability to dictate . . . who comes to power the day after a military attack.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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After protests over the economy erupted across Iran late last year, reports emerged that the regime was killing protesters. Donald Trump threatened to intervene, but did not. Estimates vary widely, but some note that thirty thousand people or more may have been killed. Now as the U.S. sends a huge military force to the Gulf, Iranians are waiting for war—and many in the country are in the shocking position of hoping for conflict, if it will end the Ayatollah’s government. The reporter Cora Engelbrecht has been recording her conversations with sources on the ground about what that could mean. Their voices were altered or overdubbed for our story, to protect them from reprisal.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

On “Where’s My Phone?,” the second track on Mitski’s eighth studio album, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” she sings, “I just want my mind to be a clear glass / Clear glass with nothing in my head.” The lyric serves as a thesis statement of sorts for a concept album that is as much an immersive literary experience as an exercise in listening. Mitski is the writer of these songs, but the speaker is someone else, a reclusive woman who resides in an unkempt house. The album’s dispatches from her secluded life style are propelled by the question of who is doing the looking and what that looking reveals about the experience of an other. Before she wishes to have a clear mind, for example, the narrator is berated by a woman on the street, who calls her a “ditch on my block.” On “In a Lake,” the speaker insists that she’d never live in a small town, because “everywhere you go makes your heart ache.” We come to understand that the outside world does not favor the speaker, who is perceived to have a type of strangeness about her. But when the lens shifts toward the interior, articulating the woman’s private monologues, the attitude is softer and more generous, even when her words seem steeped in a sense of ongoing dread. This woman, when sequestered in her house, feels more at peace than she could ever feel in the world beyond her door.

Mitski, now thirty-five, has always written songs of exceptional rawness and vulnerability, placing herself in closeup against a thin layer of glass. Her lyrical explorations of navigating a deeply feeling heart earned her a reputation as an indie bard of melancholy and loneliness, and fans, in turn, forged an intense parasocial relationship with her. In response, Mitski became immensely protective of her privacy. (In a New York profile from 2022, she refused to share the names of her cats, concerned that fans might use the information to track her down.) In an era when sharing your art tends to mean giving yourself to the public, Mitski has become about as reclusive as a musician of her stature can be, which makes the distance between the speaker’s concerns and the writer’s concerns, on “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” perhaps not so wide after all (though, as a person who writes poems, I tend to think that the exact distance is hardly any of the public’s business).

Mitski’s sound and writing style have evolved on almost every album she’s released. Her early album “Retired from Sad, New Career in Business,” from 2013, relied on big orchestral swells alongside electronics. Her breakout, “Bury Me at Makeout Creek,” released the following year, felt at times like a punk-rock sprint of guitar and drumbeats. On “Be the Cowboy,” her 2018 album, her production was more lush and full without wholly abandoning her flair for fuzzy and distorted guitar work. “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is a bit of a mashup of many of Mitski’s past endeavors, featuring big orchestral swings and moments of loud, frantic guitar, but its formal ambitions feel secondary to its expansive lyrical themes. On a line level, the songwriting comes alive with imagery and ache, such as on the album-closing song, “Lightning”—“When I die / Could I come back as the rain?” But the most fascinating quality of “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is how Mitski manages to embody an “I” with the full sense and spirit of a wonderfully complicated central character who is orbiting heartbreak and loss. In the song “Cats,” the narrator anticipates the absence of someone she still loves, a void being filled by two cats who sleep in bed with her at night. “Instead of Here” opens with a knock on the door and the woman depressed and lying on the floor instead of answering, with “death crouchin’ ” beside her. On “I’ll Change for You,” a listener overhears the woman on a drunken phone call, insisting that she’d do anything to be loved again—that she’s willing to change, to become whoever is needed to make the person return.

Despite how abject all this sounds, the protagonist does not seem weak or worthy of pity. Contrary to what she is enduring and expressing, she is rendered as someone who possesses a level of control. As the album proceeds, the lens shifts: she isn’t the one who is on the verge of madness; the world is, and she is one of the few people with the good sense to stay away from it as much as she can. The album’s concern is one that has shaped my own life and the lives of many people I know: when the world is increasingly inhospitable, is isolating oneself that irrational of a response? Mitski has no answer or illuminating moment that will make plain sense of this question for you, but the song “That White Cat,” propelled by churning percussion, perhaps provides a clue. The woman watches from her window as a neighborhood cat marks her house—a house that, she acknowledges, now pretty well belongs to the cat. At first, she insists, she has to go to work to pay for the cat’s house. Then again, to pay for the house is to pay for the wasp who lives in the roof, for the family of possums, for the bugs who will drink her blood, and for the birds who will eat those bugs, only to be killed by the cat. There is a thin border between isolation and loneliness, and, even if you retreat from the world, you are still in it. ♦

In his new book, “If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil,” the right-wing radio host and edutainment impresario Dennis Prager spends a couple of pages discussing the killing, in 1989, of a sixteen-year-old American girl by her parents, one of whom was Muslim and born in the West Bank. “I’m not picking on them because they’re Muslim or because they’re Palestinian,” Prager writes. “It just happens that this story was about them.” In the next paragraph, Prager seems to change his mind about why he’s picking on them: “In many parts of the Arab world, parents essentially own their children, especially daughters.”

Ostensibly, Prager is recounting this awful crime because it illustrates a central question taken up by his book, which is “Why do people hurt other people?” The answer, by and large, turns out to be secularism. “The death of God has led to massive deaths of men, women, and children,” Prager writes, citing the “secular doctrines” of Nazism and communism. Secular creep, he goes on, “also appears to be leading to the death of Western civilization.” One might wonder why Prager would choose a thirty-seven-year-old murder, which he implies is linked to monotheistic religious extremism, to build his case against secularism. But the God he has in mind is specifically that of “the Judeo-Christian outlook.” The sole “source of objective morality,” Prager suggests, is the Bible. Prager does not mention that the murdered girl’s mother, who held her down while her father stabbed her to death, was Catholic and from Brazil, a country whose most famous landmark is a hundred-and-twenty-four-foot statue called “Christ the Redeemer.”

“If There Is No God” is not the worst thing Prager has ever written. (That honor may go to a two-part op-ed from 2008, titled “When a Woman Isn’t in the Mood,” in which he explains why wives should have sex with their husbands even when they don’t feel like it.) That said, if Prager’s new book were a term paper, his teacher would have a lot to say. She might flag, for instance, that lack of symmetry between his argument and his choice of grisly anecdote. She might object to the tautological reasoning, or to the flagrant cultural animus and Islamophobia. Using terminology from the education world, she might say, politely, that Prager has many “areas of growth” as a student, or that his progress toward grade level is “emerging.”

Yet Prager, a co-founder of the conservative education-media nonprofit PragerU, is one of the most influential voices in education in the United States today. PragerU is not an accredited university, but curriculum materials from its PragerU Kids division, on American history, civics, and financial literacy, are approved for optional classroom use in eleven mostly right-leaning states. (One of those states, Oklahoma, also worked with PragerU to develop a short-lived multiple-choice test intended to screen teachers for signs of “woke indoctrination.” Last year, PragerU unveiled the Founders Museum, a “partnership” with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education featuring A.I.-generated video testimonials from luminaries of the American Revolution. These include a digitized John Adams who ventriloquizes the words of the right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro, almost verbatim: “Facts do not care about our feelings.”

PragerU is also supplying the multimedia content for the Freedom Truck Mobile Museums, a travelling exhibition of touch-screen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts, and A.I. slop that will chug across the country on tractor-trailers throughout 2026, in celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It seems that the battle over who defines good and evil—or, at least, over who defines American history—will be waged, in part, from the helm of an eighteen-wheeler.

Prager, who is seventy-seven, is an observant Jew who sees evangelical Christians as natural allies in his pursuit of “transforming America into a faith-based nation,” as he once wrote. (He has also lamented what he termed Jewish “bigotry” toward evangelical Christians, whose “support, and often even love, of the Jewish people and Israel is the most unrequited love I have ever seen on a large scale.”) In 2009, decades into a successful career in conservative talk radio, he co-founded PragerU, in order to provide what he called a “free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.” PragerU has received major funding from hard-right benefactors, including Betsy DeVos’s family foundation and the billionaire fracking brothers Dan and Farris Wilks. According to its most recent tax filing—which describes PragerU’s purpose as “marketing and producing educational content for all ages, 4-104, with a focus on a pro-American, Judeo-Christian message”—it received more than sixty-six million dollars in donations in 2024. (In November of that year, Prager sustained a severe spinal-cord injury in a fall that left him paralyzed below the shoulders; he has since resumed making video content for the PragerU website, and composed part of “If There Is No God” by dictation.)

Prager’s nonprofit is just one of dozens of conservative organizations, many of them Christian, that are named as “partners” in the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which is overseen by Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary. The coalition has the secular task of developing programming for America’s birthday, such as PragerU’s Founders Museum and the Freedom Trucks, the latter of which received a fourteen-million-dollar grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. (In March, President Trump signed executive orders to dismantle both the I.M.L.S. and the D.O.E.; they remain alive, albeit in shrunken, ideologized versions of their former selves.) Other America 250 partners include both of the major pro-Trump think tanks (the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation), a Christian liberal-arts school (Hillsdale College), the Supreme Court’s favorite conservative-Christian legal-advocacy group (the Alliance Defending Freedom), the Christian-right-aligned church of Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA), and something called Priests for Life.

According to a D.O.E. press release, the America 250 coalition is “dedicated to renewing patriotism, strengthening civic knowledge, and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.” Of course, one of America’s founding principles, taught in every civics class, is the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which might seem to frown on the knitting together of so many religious organizations and public funds intended to advance civic education.

“Real patriotic education,” McMahon said, at the opening of the Founders Museum last year, “means that, just as our founders loved and honored America, so we should honor them, while deeply learning and earnestly debating, still, their ideas.” One way to take McMahon up on this challenge is to deeply learn what James Madison wrote, in 1785, after a bill arose in Virginia’s General Assembly to establish a taxpayer provision for “Teachers of the Christian Religion.” In a petition to his colleagues in the Assembly, Madison asked, “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?” He abhorred the proposal as “a melancholy mark” of “sudden degeneracy.” “Instead of holding forth an Asylum to the persecuted,” he wrote, “it is itself a signal of persecution.” A governing body that would permit such an incursion on the free exercise of religion was one that “may sweep away all our fundamental rights,” Madison warned. The bill died.

Although PragerU has won fans at the highest levels of federal and state government, its educational content and short-form videos are reviled across many chambers of the internet, where the Prager name—attached to videos with titles such as “DEI Must Die,” “Preferred Pronouns or Prison,” “Multiculturalism: A Bad Idea,” and “Is Fascism Right or Left?”—has become synonymous with MAGA-brand disinformation. (PragerU claims that its videos receive tens of millions of views per quarter, but these metrics have not been independently verified.) A PragerU Kids video called “How to Think Objectively,” which was reportedly shown in Houston public schools, provides the thinnest façade for a lesson in climate-change denial. Democratic socialism and, especially, immigration are scourges of the Prager-verse, which has attempted to undermine the constitutional provision of birthright citizenship and cranked out endless pro-ICE videos since the Department of Homeland Security began its violent occupations of Minneapolis and other major U.S. cities.

The most noxious PragerU videos often involve slavery. In the PragerU Kids series “Leo & Layla’s History Adventures,” animated versions of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington are deputized to play down the historical significance of slavery; Christopher Columbus goes a step further, using slavery to introduce children to the concept of moral relativism. (“How can you come here to the fifteenth century and judge me by your standards in the twenty-first century?” Columbus asks.) A now deleted video—as bland as a corporate-compliance webinar, and scored to a generic hip-hop beat—gives Robert E. Lee a thumbs-up for crushing the attempted rebellion of enslaved people at Harper’s Ferry. The video also uncritically shares Lee’s view that slavery was harder on whites than on Black people, since “Blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa.”

In terms of historical facts and narrative, the A.I. videos that PragerU produced for the Founders Museum offer nothing so repugnant. In fact, they offer close to nothing at all. Like a poorly trained large language model, John Adams filibusters on his bona fides, calling himself a “voice for independence” who believed in “telling the truth” and who “stood on principle.” The content is oddly content-free, and then it repeats. Thomas Jefferson, who never blinks, says, “We must guard liberty with learning.” Adams, who seems to be reading off a teleprompter, tells us, “Guard liberty well, for, once lost, it is lost forever.” Ben Franklin agrees: “Respect this founding, friend. It is your inheritance, hard-won and fragile. Guard it well.”

A commonality across all the PragerU videos, and distinctly those in the PragerU Kids catalogue, is their total aesthetic bankruptcy, their absence of beauty or joy or wit. It’s impossible to imagine anyone enjoying any of this or electing to watch it, not because it’s factually wrong or propagandistic but because it’s ugly and boring. The intentionality of the misinformation—or the absence of information—coupled with the laziness of the execution ties a perfect knot of contempt. The various characters in “How to Think Objectively” grimace and vocalize as if the woke mob had dosed them with tainted ketamine. The “Leo & Layla” render-farm animation of Martin Luther King, Jr., sways back and forth affectlessly, like a puppet on a stick, voiced by an actor doing a bad Jay-Z impression. Perhaps Dr. King is dissociating, and the viewer should follow his lead.

In the Founders Museum, PragerU’s Chuck E. Cheese-ification of Presidents is hideous enough, but the animation deteriorates further as you click through to lesser-known revolutionaries, their mouths taking on the shape and muscular coördination of a Wombo A.I. The merchant Francis Lewis blankly recounts the death of his wife after her imprisonment by the British, and concludes, “Freedom demands much of us, but what it gives in return is everything.” Another Founder, Roger Sherman, intones, “I did my part. Now you must do yours.” It’s entirely unclear what the viewer is being asked to do, which may be the point. Dennis Prager once admitted that he didn’t mind accusations that PragerU indoctrinates its young viewers, saying, “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement.” But perhaps indoctrination and stupefaction go hand in hand. Maybe reaching patriotic Judeo-Christian nirvana should feel like the unbearable lightness of an emptied mind. ♦

Filmmakers like to call themselves storytellers for the same reason that politicians like to call themselves public servants: it’s a show of deference toward a popular ideal. Yet few of them treat stories as their fundamental unit of creation. One who does so is the Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, whose narrative imagination is so fertile that “prolific” might as well be part of his name. He has developed a system of low-budget and D.I.Y. production that enables him to make many movies quickly. Moreover, the films that have emerged—twenty-five features since 2010—suggest that his casual observations are instantly crystallized not in the form of images or characters, moods or even ideas, but as full-blown dramas. His latest release, “What Does That Nature Say to You,” which screened in last year’s New York Film Festival and is opening February 27th, is the fictional synthesis of a car, a house, and a bottle. It’s also one of the few movies of his that, were it transcribed and handed over to a mediocre director, would still bear the same spark of life, even if it wouldn’t similarly catch emotional and aesthetic fire.

Here, the art house meets the Fockers, albeit with an air of mystery and wisdom that, from the start, sets it apart from simpler or more blatant approaches to the subject. A youngish couple is parked at a roadside in rural South Korea, near a river and facing some mountains: Kim Junhee (Kang Soyi) is returning home to visit her parents. Her boyfriend, Donghwa (Ha Seongguk), whom they have never met, has driven her there and is dropping her off. He admires the family’s house, perched high on a mountainside, initially from afar, and she invites him to come up and see it. The resulting encounters with her family—her father, Kim Oryeong (Kwon Haehyo); her mother, Choi Sunhee (Cho Yunhee); and her sister, Kim Neunghee (Park Miso)—are the catalysts of revelations that prove consequential for the couple and the family alike.

Hong’s method is akin to drypoint: a sort of Impressionism of spontaneity, intricacy, and solidity, in which the rapid gesture gains in weight as it’s extended in time. He relies on copious, blunt, expressive, and philosophically reflective dialogue that is nonetheless entirely in keeping with the personalities of the speakers and with the immediate logic of the action. Like all melodramatists, Hong deals in coincidence and magnifies casual connections and minor accidents into life-shaking events. Without restraining his characters’ relentless forward motion with exposition, he finds them burdened by their past and revealing it in brief but incendiary flashes at unguarded moments of conversation. As ever in Hong’s movies, one of the key looseners of such talk is alcohol—which, here, takes on a peculiarly gendered role, as Oryeong, quickly bonding with Donghwa by admiring the oddity and beauty of the younger man’s thirty-year-old car, breaks out a bottle of makgeolli and then another—and then, at dinner, serves him some fine whiskey.

The men’s admiration is mutual: Donghwa is struck by the beauty of the family home and is amazed when Junhee tells him that her father designed it himself. He did so, she adds, for his mother, to whom he was deeply devoted. Oryeong did even more for her, it turns out—he landscaped the mountainside for her pleasure and comfort during her final illness. Donghwa—who’s revealed to be thirty-five—rhapsodizes about Oryeong’s devotion, and filial piety over all, although (and, perhaps, because) his own family bonds are strained. Donghwa’s father is rich and famous, familiar to Junhee’s family as Attorney Ha. Junhee’s sister says she’s sure that this “huge halo effect” must make Donghwa look all the better to her parents. Yet Donghwa, a poet, has a frayed relationship with him and prefers to maintain financial independence, though it means making a meagre living as a part-time wedding videographer. He devotes most of his time to his writing, with little to show for it but some publications in small magazines. His enthusiasm for poetry is shared by Junhee’s mother, Sunhee, who also writes, in her spare time, and has also published a bit. The uneasy overlap of enthusiasms and concerns, the grinding mesh of art and money, the diverging varieties of responsibility and independence yield a volatile dramatic mix that’s put under ever-greater pressure by a literal confinement in what turns out to be an apocalyptic dinner, a grand conflagration over the course of twenty minutes that is a set piece for the ages.

There’s a facile critical tendency to liken a wide range of talky and small-scale dramas to the films of Éric Rohmer. The comparison is almost never apt, because Rohmer’s movies are a form of stifled Surrealism, with wild and dangerous desires pressing against and threatening to shatter their taut narrative surfaces. And Hong, in general, is far more like a classic melodramatist, albeit with a modernist twist, closer in his vision of hidden history and ambient authority to the work of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. But “What Does That Nature Say to You” is the rare film where the “Rohmeresque” label is actually appropriate and revealing. As the title suggests, nature—the joy and inspiration it provides, its force, and the emotional and material price of efforts to transform and master it—plays a major role in the story. The site of the family’s house, the filial aspect of its creation, Oryeong’s efforts to embellish its wild setting and to optimize the vistas that it commands, and Donghwa’s contemplative nature poetry all converge in a surprising, exalted scene—an extended discussion between the long-married parents that blends hard-won reflective wisdom and self-interested practicality in a lyrical vision of deep-rooted romance.

Conflicts between parents and children aren’t new to Hong’s work; they drive such recent films as “Hotel by the River,” “Introduction,” and “Walk Up.” But “What Does That Nature Say to You” draws the battle lines with dazzling clarity and brings new complexities to the issue. The result is a drama of love and money, of sacred and profane love, of the forces that pull couples together and drive them apart. Hong renders these universal conflicts locally specific and intimately personal. His cinematic method gives rise to his singular style; he realizes the story with a light-toned but robust set of performances, a calm but startling array of images that dissect the action even as they frame it with painterly precision, and a control of pace that encompasses both madly rushing torrents of dialogue and an exquisitely gradual increase of tension as the characters reveal themselves. It’s a tale that any cinephile could imagine Rohmer confecting, but Hong adds a crucial element utterly alien to the Rohmerverse: doubt. His vertiginous ending, suspended over a romantic abyss, redefines the very notion of an emotional breakdown. ♦